Team: 1 PM, 3 UX designers, 4x engineers
Role: UX design and research
Contribution: web channel feature development, prototyping, research, usability testing, visual design
What is control hub?
Cisco Control Hub is an application built to manage, troubleshoot and provide end-to-end control over Cisco collaboration devices, services, and workspaces within a company. From small startups to multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of users, Control Hub offers a “single pane of glass” for system administrators to efficiently and securely manage collaboration for hybrid work forces.
The challenges
Since Control Hub is a centralised system to manage people, services, devices, and spaces, system administrators need a powerful tool that is intuitive and exceptionally functional. Creating this experience is challenging for several reasons.
Stakeholders
Today,11,000+ IT professionals use Control Hub to provide collaboration solutions to over 9 million people.
Technical and operational complexity is high in the majority of collaboration ecosystems.
There is a desire for product experience and feature flexibility to accommodate wide-ranging hardware and software needs and hybrid arrangements in workplace environments.
Although most system administrators are experts with extensive training to manage a company’s IT infrastructure, not all that manage collaboration services have this experience level, leading to a wide range in proficiencies and utilization patterns within Control Hub.
Contributions
I was one of three designers embedded within an agile product development team. Primarily, I focused on adding advanced functionalities to Control Hub, alongside optimizing existing features. I also supported a full UI revamp of the existing Control Hub platform as it transitioned from on-prem to cloud, which meant defining, testing, and applying a new internal design system.
work includes collaborating across teams with engineering to translate complex backend requirements into functional features, feasibility mapping and roadmap strategy with product owners, iterative prototyping, usability testing and research with IT administrators and competitor analysis.
Working style
This work was highly technical and driven by engineering needs and capabilities, which meant working side-by-side with our engineering team. In tandem, making Control Hub accessible and useful to administrators was of utmost importance, so throughout the development process, we conducted on-going usability testing with IT administrators to ensure we were maintained alignment with their utilization needs and learned from their own experiences.
Research
Internal research
When a new device and/or additional software functionality is introduced to the Cisco collaboration portfolio, it is important do a high level mapping of how it would exist, mature, and be managed within Control hub.
Competitor analysis
Before developing a new feature, it is critical to conduct in-depth competitor analysis to benchmark our own strategy and understand the offerings of other collaboration tech companies.
Preliminary user stories
Once desired functionality is determined, together with the engineering team, we created user stories for a new feature, paired with possible system flows to address specific backend requirements. This was a great a starting point for developing both coherent UX and feasible backend concurrently, and a way to make further discussions more tangible and jointly owned across teams.
UX/UI development
Control Hub ux/ui revamp extract
The revamp of Control Hub was an exercise in giving the UI and UX of the platform a refresh to make it more accessible and intuitive. This delivery, which lived outside of Cisco’s user-facing design system, contained elements such as new patterns and states, copy, and interactions. Multiple rounds of administrator interviews were conducted to inform its final state.
